The world had courage, faith, beauty, and love, and it had music, which, although not merely an abstraction, was equal to the greatest abstractions and principles – its power to lift, clarify, and car...
The way she looked at him, and he knew it, it was clear that she was seeking someone she could love, someone who would love her as if she were once again a girl and the world was young. There was no q...
The beauty of truth is that it need not be proclaimed or believed. It skips from soul to soul, changing form each time it touches, but it is what it is, I have seen it, and someday you will, too.
That she intended to swim alone, and had ridden alone to such a deserted place, puzzled him. Though the countryside around Rome was neither Sicily nor Calabria, it was not safe for an unaccompanied wo...
That is, Harry said, because the world has never seen - in initiative, imagination, courage, and steadfastness - anything like the American fighting man. Not the Germans, the non-Germans, the semi-G...
Somewhat unnerved by what he felt were Germanic currents in a man whom he had taken to be just an Italian intellectual who ate flowers, Strassnitzky cautiously argued that the records are secret, part...
No one knows better than I that it's all here, and need not be explained or interpreted—just seized.
Life is so quick that it's all played out at the gates of death, and the value of resolution is that it quickens life.
In a thousand years, Alessandro said, this incident will be remembered. By then, of course, we will have become angels, devils, or a dragon that breathes fire...but we have given this rock a story tha...
If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined.
I've never touched a woman, Nicolò said, in deep despair. You will. It'll take you years to learn what to do—not because it's a matter of technique, but precisely because it isn't. It's a matter of de...
I think it would be vain to imagine that we could be favored without effort. As I understand it, miracles come to those who risk defeat in seeking them. They come to those who have exhausted themselve...
I returned to the university only after the Second World War, and, even then, not having been in the resistance, I had political difficulties. Why weren't you in the resistance? I was tired. And you h...
How the holy and the profane mix in the light of day and at the end of life is sometimes the most beautiful thing in this world and a compassionate entry into the next. After failure and defeat, a con...
How far do you have to go before you forgive yourself for how you were born?
He wanted actually to live inside the dream that captured his eye, to spend his days and nights in a fume of burnished gold.
He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how,...
Because I don’t need oxygen. I’ve already come to all my conclusions. I’m just slowly gliding down. Someday I’ll be as light as a feather.
As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe....
And then one morning the soldiers grew suddenly still as the heavy latches were lifted and turned. Just before the doors slid apart, a man from Pisa took the opportunity to say, The air is thin. We're...